LinkPatrol

One of the main things I do to run successful campaigns online is always look offline. As I was watching television tonight, a Yahoo! Answers commercial came on and BOOM…It’s time to really jump on it.

If you’re in the social media craze or doing SMO (social media optimization), give Yahoo! Answers a shot.

Yahoo recently announced a new mission statement, which is to “connect people”. That’s exactly what we’re seeing with Yahoo taking a prime time spot on national television promoting this feature.

Yahoo Answers can basically do what the social bookmarking sites or network sites do which is branding, link juice (Answers does use No Follow), and drive traffic to your website.

Become a member of Yahoo Answers, upload avatar and fill in your profile with general and accurate information.

Pick the category most relevant to your business or site.

Check that category daily for questions that you can answer accurately and informatively.

Perform searches in Yahoo for your top keywords or keyphrases. Answer the questions supplied by Yahoo Answers in the normal Yahoo Search results, these will get the most web search eyes and possibly clicks on your links.

Use the Yahoo Answers social network to make friends with every person asking or answering questions within that category. Yahoo Answers uses a one click Ajax tool for adding friends (contacts) which is very efficient.

Answer the questions that you can and link to your site as a reference when best suited.

Link to other sites as references so your participation is not mistaken as spamming.

If others are answering questions more accurately than you, star or vote for their answers, this is a good way to make friends.

Take two or three hours a week to perform this simple yet effective social media participation, then check your log files or stats to see if this is building traffic and conversions. If it is, rinse and repeat.

Also take into account that Yahoo Answers information will be indexed by Yahoo for a long time, this is not just a quick marketing fix. Yahoo Answers info is also integrated into Yahoo Local, Yahoo Search, Yahoo Brand Channels and other Yahoo content channels, so the audience is growing significantly.

Yahoo announced on May 7th, it has reached 10 million registered US users, with over 90 million worldwide and growing at a steady pace.

We will probably see more and more Yahoo Answers being surfaced within search results (that’s just speculation on my part) as Yahoo Shortcuts or premier listings. Now is the time to take advantage of Yahoo Answers as a marketing platform.

Pablo Palatnik is the author of the blog PalatnikFactor, focusing on all things Online Marketing and Search Engine Optimization specialist for Fortune3, a shopping cart software company by online retailers, for online retailers.

Have there been any great posts on the other Answer sites as well? I’ve been finding Guru, Yahoo Answers, this pay per call answer site (forget the URL) and then Google Answers which is actually rather easy to get into, although the answers are always terribly complicated.

Anyways, I will get onto SMO with Yahoo Answers immediately, great tip. Thanks!

You know, when I find a blog that purports to give advice about link building, or about SEO in general, I always wonder if they really have their visitors interests at heart when they turn on the NoFollow attribute in the comments section, as was done here.

@Find a Puppy : I’m trying to find a way to allow organic links in comments AND combat spamming. We receive hundreds of thousands of spam comments per day, some of which make it through the filters. Once we can kill all of the crap spam in the system, we’ll then get rid of no follow.

The last think I want is to know that the link juice from my comments on my site is assisting spammers.